by Carmel Bird
Thomas Bock, portraitist of Eliza Langhorne, did pencil drawings of the head of Alexander Pearce after death.
A Hobart surgeon, Mr Crockett, took the head itself and skinned it, removed the flesh, the eyes, the brain. He then boiled it and presumably displayed it in his rooms or his home. It has ended up in the Academy of Natural Sciences (a name, in this context, to conjure with) in Philadelphia.
Perhaps one day I will go to Philadelphia to see it; I went to Philadelphia a long time ago, but then I didn’t know that Alexander Pearce’s head, with the jaws that ate his companions, was there.
I first became interested in Thomas Bock as the man who did the watercolour of Mathinna. I was familiar with the picture of Mathinna when I was a child, but I don’t know where I first saw it. It is now kept in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart. The portrait itself is most haunting and arresting, and the story of the life of its subject is particularly sad and moving.
In 1839 Lady Jane, wife of the Governor of the island, took into her home, more or less as a member of the family, a five-year-old Aboriginal girl, Mary, whom she renamed Mathinna. According to Lady Franklin, Mathinna always wore a red dress, red stockings and black shoes. She is wearing a red dress in the portrait by Thomas Bock. ‘I have got a doll and shift and petticoat. I have got a red frock,’ Mathinna writes in a letter to Governor Franklin. But in her portrait she has no doll; her hands are softly clasped in her lap. The background to this child whose skin is soft brown with grey shadows is a pale palomino. Her neckline is more modest than those of Eliza and Girl; her sleeves short and fitted. No coral beads. Her short hair is made up of tight black bubbles, and her eyes, huge, brown, candid, appealing and full of love and wonder, gaze straight, so straight, at you. Left ear visible; feet not visible. She sits not on a chair, but, it seems, on nothing at all, as if she floats or is placed on sand. She smiles with her pretty, wide mouth, the saddest smile you ever saw. There’s an eagerness, an intelligence that suggests the painter has placed her brain behind the surface of her forehead. It seems to me that she is naked underneath the dress—there is no hint of undergarments, no dangling frills of lacy pantaloons. A broad, tight black sash, a harsh thing out of keeping with the mystic, ethereal mood of the child.
When Mathinna was eight the Franklins returned to England, leaving her at the Queen’s Orphan School in Hobart, where there were five hundred other children. No children would accept her. For eight years she endured this, and then she went to the forlorn Aboriginal settlement at Oyster Cove. At twenty-one Mathinna fell drunkenly into a puddle and drowned.
In the portrait the punctum is a flutter of filmy scarlet cloth that hangs, like the wing of a butterfly, from the side of the left sleeve. It is not unlike the yellow feather in the hat of Eliza’s doll, not unlike the transparent white lace under the chin of Girl’s cat. The little wound, the disturbance in the picture.
Seven years after he painted Mathinna, Thomas Bock painted Eliza. Who was Thomas Bock?
Thomas Bock was born around 1790 in Birmingham, England, where he became a successful engraver and miniature painter. He had a wife and children and was pretty well established, and we might never have heard of him had he not mixed up a herbal concotion and given it to a pregnant girl in the hope she would abort his child. He was caught and tried and sentenced and sent to Hobart where he went on engraving and painting and was eventually fully pardoned in 1835. In 1837 Governor and Lady Franklin arrived from England, and Thomas Bock received from them many valuable and prestigious commissions. His wife died in England in 1844, and in 1850 Thomas married again, in Hobart. He died in 1855. As well as drawing convicts, painting portraits of Aboriginals and etching banknotes, he did many society portraits in oils, most of which are in private collections. In 1991 there was an exhibition of his work in Launceston, Hobart and Canberra, and, although I am sorry to say I didn’t see the exhibition, I have a copy of the catalogue compiled by Diane Dunbar. In the catalogue Mathinna, in her little red European dress, is placed opposite a watercolour of the head and shoulders of Manalargenna, who is a chief and who appears naked, decorated with cicatrices and ochre and necklaces, carrying a piece of burning bark. The contrast between the two pictures is very striking.
I have given the barest outline of the artist’s life, a few facts. More facts are known, but all the facts only tantalise because they don’t answer enough questions, because they add up only to a list of facts, not a life. What was the relationship between Thomas Bock and Ann Yates, the pregnant woman to whom he gave the herbal concotion? What was his relationship with Mary Day Underhill, who helped him with the herbs and who also was convicted? Did the baby live? What did his wife and children make of all this? What was his relationship with Lady Jane Franklin? Did he ever think about Ann Yates? The baby? When he painted the pictures of Eliza, of Mathinna, did thoughts of his own daughters, Harriet and Emma, back in Birmingham, ever cross his mind? Did he write letters to them? Did they write to him? These are the questions to be answered by the historical novelist with elements of fact and elements of fiction. My position is different—I actually enjoy posing the questions for their own sake.
When I received, in 1996, the postcard showing the portrait of Eliza Langhorne, I consulted the catalogue for the exhibition and there I found Major Butler’s Kidneys.
On page fifty-two of the catalogue, underneath a miniature portrait of an unknown gentleman (watercolour on ivory), there is a colour plate reproduction: ‘Anatomical drawing (Major Butler’s Kidneys) c1840, pencil and watercolour on paper, Private collection.’ It’s got writing on the back in Thomas’s hand: ‘Major Butler/23 Oct 1840.’ And the catalogue provides the information that Major James Butler’s death was recorded in the Hobart Town Courier on 23 October, and that the likely cause of death was tuberculosis. I could rush out on an archival mission to discover exactly who Major Butler was, but I like to work, as far as I can, with the materials to hand. So the only reference I found to a James Butler was in The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes. This was Commandant James Butler of Hobart, who gave a convict twenty-five lashes for inciting a logging gang to go on strike in 1825. Such curious details history singles out for record. What I wonder is whether this James Butler with the lash was the one whose kidneys came under the scrutiny of Thomas Bock, the one whose kidneys are now lying before me on the open page. Let’s pretend it was.
I found the watercolour of the kidneys so arresting because it is the only picture of its kind in the catalogue. There are elegant oils of Mr and Mrs Wilkinson and Mr and Mrs Robertson, and landscapes, and drawings and etchings. A small copper engraving of the teeth and underjaw of a platypus is the nearest other thing to Major Butler’s Kidneys. Somehow it is easier to look at a scientific study of a part of a curious beast than it is to look at a faithfully rendered coloured picture of the diseased kidneys of a dead Major. Was it a medical commission? Artistic curiosity? Perhaps both. The picture resides in a private collection, as do many of the works shown in the exhibition. Whose, I wonder, and does the private owner display the kidneys? Where? Do people notice? What do they think? What do they say? Did Thomas Bock paint or draw any other parts of the body of Major Butler? Head? Heart? Hand?
The picture consists of two images—a cross-section of a kidney, and an external view. The latter is placed above the former, on a rectangular piece of pinkish-cream paper; they float there, having no shadow, shading or context. The top one is a kidney with some pale-pink tissue attached in the indented curve. Its surface is pitted with craters, small and large, and it is motley coloured, a dabbed mixture of grey, pink, crimson, mustard and yellow. If it was a stone you’d call it beautiful. The startling thing is the sight of two large bubbles on the surface, one partly translucent, partly red and yellow, the other solid, dark and a terrible purple. The cross-section has an upper outline of thin crimson, moving down into pale pink, with egg-shaped areas of yellowy grey, set into yellow fat and pale-pinkish-grey tissue that fades into the paper on which it is painted.
The punctum is the transparent bubble at the top of the picture.
The lattice shadow of the red plastic basket casts the impression of prison bars across the page, across the watercolour of an unknown gentleman and across Major Butler’s Kidneys. Still, the picture of Eliza is the only one into which the bright-red reflection of the bars sinks deep. Perhaps it is the glossy dark surface, the angle of the sun.
But all these people—Eliza, Girl, Mathinna, the unknown gentleman and the kidneys (at least) of Major Butler—lie here in a little prison of my making. Even the private collector is here. I—and Thomas Bock and Ammi Phillips and the sun—have conspired to capture them, to put them together in a little cage for the afternoon. You and I and the private collector are alive; the others are dead. They are like objects in a glass case in a museum. Open the lid of the case with the key. Put them together out in the air while I open up the images with words, paint them into my sentences, draw the eye and the imagination of my reader into the picture. Look at this, I say, it looks this way, that way. Listen to this. Imagine this. Imagine a painting, a portrait of a child. Imagine Major Butler. Imagine he flogged a man twenty-five times. Imagine he died in Hobart of tuberculosis. Imagine his kidneys. Sliced in half.
The Golden Moment
The story of the golden moment is a story about suburban Australia in the 1950s. The street in which the story takes place is often called ‘the golden mile’, because for generations so many wealthy bankers, barristers and surgeons have lived there in grandeur and comfort with their beautiful wives and happy families. Almost all of these families have very white skins indeed, and are by religion Christians (of the Protestant kind). The rare Jewish or Roman Catholic family is treated with superb tolerance and charity, but it is understood that such families are darkened by a blight too powerful and mysterious to name. The houses themselves bear the names they were given by the indigenous inhabitants of the land, and some of these names reflect a nostalgia for places far away, others expressing a hope in the youthful country of Australia. The style of architecture is labelled ‘Federation’ in recognition of the modern birth of the country itself. The trees and flowers are by and large European, and the branches of the oaks and elms that line the street on one side almost touch those on the other, so that in summer a magical green tunnel arches above the traffic, and people from less beautiful suburbs drive along here just to marvel at the trees along the golden mile.
A golden moment is that time of the afternoon photographers love, when the light of day bathes the world in one last glow of radiance, when Paradise is promised, when everything stands still at the instant between the darkness and the light, when fairies and goblins and other spirits good and bad may be revealed.
The golden moment on the golden mile is one of nature’s marvels.
On the veranda of a large old house called The Lilacs in this prosperous part of this Australian city there sits a woman. She wears a grandmotherly floral dress and is reclining on a cane lounge. The time is peacetime, in the middle of the nineteen-fifties. There is of course a Cold war, but in the warmth of the summer sun in the late afternoon, this cold war casts no shadow, drops no snowflake on the veranda of The Lilacs.
Paths, flowerbeds, shrubs, trees, vines, a wall—these divide the land on which this house is built from the land on which the next house, called Santa Fe, stands. The foreign and exotic name of Santa Fe alerts visitors and strangers to the fact that there is a certain difference here.
So, in this story, the sun shines and the bees drone, butterflies flit. A haze of dreamy happiness drifts across the garden of The Lilacs. The woman drinks weak gin, lime and soda, reads a book, a romance.
Ploc! Ploc! This is the sound of young men and women playing tennis on the court in the garden of Santa Fe. Laughter, shouts. Ploc! Ploc! A rhododendron bush, unimaginably large, with pearly pink florets, frilled and abundant, grows between Santa Fe and The Lilacs. It is possible that sometimes through spaces that thread between the leaves, a flash of white pleated skirt might dart, flick, distract.
In the romance being read by the Lilac woman, men and women stare into each other’s eyes. They kiss and they swim and they dance on terraces at twilight.
Click! Someone has taken a photograph of some of the girls and some of the boys as they sit in the shade beside the tennis court at Santa Fe. The woman, on her veranda, is unable to hear the sound of the camera, such a small sound to travel across the distance between her and the tennis players. All sounds are masked by the noise of parrots in one of the gum trees. Hundreds of green birds with rosy cheeks that feed on the tree with vigour and raucous intensity, decorating the branches like bright stuffed birds on a Christmas tree. The sound they make as they squawk and twitter all together has a peculiar quality; it seems able to enter the ear and invade the mind and fill the head. If Lilac shuts her eyes she can experience the absence of her brain as her cranial cavity is inhabited by the collective cry of pleasure, greed and joy. The green and rosy joy of living.
Possibly, this is Paradise. Perhaps the tennis players have just taken a picture of Paradise, where sun shines, birds sing, bees buzz, flowers bloom, woman reads, hero and heroine embrace, boys and girls in white play tennis.
The woman finishes reading, closes the book as sunset glows on the fiction of a golden beach. For a few moments the woman hovers in a corridor between the sunset on the beach and the sunlight that falls in dappled patches on the veranda. Then the hero and the heroine and the beach fade, and the woman hears the ploc! as the ball hits the racquet.
The woman begins to think about the girls who are playing tennis, who live behind the hedges of Santa Fe.
A white cat stalks in the shadows of The Lilacs; a black dog watches the tennis at Santa Fe. Each garden has a goldfish pond and a display of roses.
The woman on the veranda thinks about the girls from Santa Fe—Rose, Veronica, Marion, Clare and Aurora Blackwood. Aurora, the youngest, was born without fingers. She is home from her convent boarding school for the holidays. Local rumour says she will take the veil, renounce the world, enter.
Just before the war, in 1938, Aurora was born. A kind of portent, an astonishment, a perfect picture of a baby girl with the oddest little triangles for hands and the sweetest disposition. She had intellect and a charming singing voice. She wore little mittens, always, made from fine crochet, or softest leather, or silk. She waved her paws around like lavender bags. Ten toes, perfect. Teeth. Long golden curls. Memory like an elephant. Manners, beautiful. She was a swift and elegant swimmer.
Everybody said how did this happen, why did this happen. Was it something in the water, the food, the medicines, the air.
Was it cat fur, dog hair. Lack of sunlight, exercise, vitamins. Was it the result of bad thoughts. Or the sight of a fishmonger’s mittens at just the wrong moment. Radio waves. The stars. The moon. A shock, a sudden and terrible noise. Mathematics or geology. Electricity. Witchcraft.
A tremor shook the earth beneath Santa Fe and The Lilacs and all the houses around just when the hands were forming. Or was it an insect. The war. Naturally people thought, sometimes murmured, about the possibility of heredity. But this was an idea that was quickly dismissed. Four perfect girls—and then the dropping off of fingers? There was nothing whatsoever like that in the background of Handsome Mr Blackwood and his Beautiful Wife. Strange things happen. It’s fate, the stars, the planets, the insects, the wars.
A friend of Mr Blackwood, a doctor, very gifted and visionary, said that if this kind of thing happened in the future it would probably be possible to reconstruct, fabricate, borrow, graft, grow the fingers. He said some really terrible and astounding things—if another baby died, supposing, then that baby’s fingers could, in time to come, he imagined, be grafted like the cuttings of a fruit tree onto the little hands of a baby such as Aurora. Imagine. A miracle.
So in one sense Aurora Blackwood was born too soon. Or was that just in time? Later in the century she could have had the knuckl
es, bones, joints, sinews, muscles, blood vessels and any other material that goes to make up the hands of the dead baby of a concert violinist. Aurora’s own skin would be needed. Smooth as a baby’s bottom, take the silky-satin skin from Aurora’s bottom and make for her a pair of gloves. These remarkable gloves, ladies and gentlemen, were made from the skin of a baby’s bottom, and will fold up and fit into the shell of a walnut. Fold up, roll up, double up with mirth. See also the miracle of the little violinist. Her hands play the sonata while her mind wanders at will. See the fattest woman in the western world, the tallest man, the dance of the seven veils, the facts of life covered by a bunch of feathers. Everything happens here under the big top. Roll up.
They took Aurora to Lourdes. The whole family went. Apparently it is not unheard of for fingers, arms, legs, noses, ears to grow in the miraculous waters. But nothing happened in this case. The family did a short tour of the Continent. War was coming. Visited French relatives. (Celeste Blackwood, the mother, is half French. Was it something French that caused the baby’s hands to stop short just before the fingers?) They climbed the Eiffel Tower, lit candles in Notre Dame, prayed fervently in the basilica of Sacre Coeur. Papal audience. Bridge of Sighs. Gondola. First ship home. War.
When Aurora went to kindergarten she learnt to do fantastic things with plasticine, and all the other children were very kind. She was a dancer and a singer. It was in the days before finger-painting had been invented. She was good with crayons, bending her little paw to make marvellous marks on paper. All the colours of the rainbow and some nice thick shiny black. As she grew older art became her thing. She drew and painted—watercolour, oil, pastel, charcoal.